B.A. in Global Studies

LIU Global offers a BA degree in Global Studies, a discipline that investigates the world’s interdependent political, economic, cultural, and ecological systems. Global Studies equips future leaders with tools to analyze challenges, issues, and processes that transcend national and disciplinary boundaries, preparing them to develop solutions to these challenges at the local, national, regional, and global levels.

Students complete the Global Studies degree through four years of coursework and integrated field experience undertaken as they travel eastward around the world‐‐from Latin America, to Europe and North Africa, to Austral‐Asia, and finally to the United States. Students begin with the Global Studies foundation year in Central America. In their second and third years, they travel to Europe and then to China or Australia/Asia, respectively. In the first semester of their senior year, they are placed in an international internship and carry out independent research, followed by the final Capstone Semester in New York City, where they complete their senior thesis and are placed in a second internship. Through their travels, students acquire the knowledge, skills, and perspectives necessary to provide leadership in an increasingly globalized world.

The Global Studies curriculum is composed of three kinds of coursework:

Area Studies courses and fieldwork delivered at each LIU Global College center or program. Drawing on LIU Global’s decades of engagement with partners and communities around the world, these courses deepen students’ knowledge of the countries, languages, and cultures of the region in which the center or program is located. The area studies courses combine classroom work with integrated field experiences and travel. (Consult the Program Locations page for details about each program.)

Global Studies core courses and fieldwork that build academic knowledge and skills across the program’s four years. This sequence of required courses, distributed systematically around the world, equips students with disciplinary lenses, as well as critical thinking, communication, and research skills. The sequence culminates in a set of upper division courses in the last three semesters that include two senior‐year internships and the completion of a senior thesis.

Global Studies is a relatively new discipline, offered by over 300 universities around the world at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. For 50 years, LIU Global College (along with its parent institution, Friends World College) has been a pioneer in the field. Long before anyone had thought about “global studies,” Morris Mitchell, the founder of Friends World College, asserted the need for an experiential, multidisciplinary approach to understanding the totality of humanity’s challenges. In 1965, he called the College’s pedagogical enterprise “world education.”

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